Educational Uses of a Wiki

Educational Uses of Wikis

Students can use a wiki to develop research projects, either as an individual or a group project, with the wiki acting as ongoing documentation of their work.

Wikis can be used for students to add summaries of their thoughts from the prescribed readings, building a collaborative annotated bibliography.

In distance learning environments, the tutor can publish course resources like syllabus and handouts, and students can edit and comment on these directly (for all to see).

Wikis can be used as a knowledge base for teachers, enabling them to share reflections and thoughts regarding teaching practices and allowing for versioning and documentation; essential to the usability of such a resource is that it is searchable, has easy navigation and categorisation, and file management, all of which current wiki environments provide.

Wikis can be used to map concepts: they are useful for brainstorming, and authoring a wiki on a given topic produces a linked network of resources.

A wiki can be used to facilitate a presentation in place of conventional software, like Keynote and PowerPoint, and (given a suitable working environment) students are able to directly comment on and revise the presentation while it takes place.

Wikis are tools for group authoring: often groups collaborate on a document by sending it on to each member of the group in turn, emailing a file that each person edits on their computer, and some attempt is then made to coordinate the edits so that everyone’s work is equally represented; using a wiki pulls the group members together and enables them to build and edit the document on a single, central wiki page.

Wikis are being used for collective note taking. One student would edit the wiki during the class discussion or lecture so that all other class members may access the notes at a later time. This is a perfect way to keep absent students up on everything that they missed.

Wikis can be used to tell a collective story. The teacher, or a student, could write the first paragraph of a story. Then a second student would add on to the story. A third student would add on to the story, and so forth.

Wikis can be used as an individual portfolio where a student would deposit examples of their best work combined with a reflection of their learning. The same could be done for an entire class to keep a running log of their learning throughout the school year with examples of best work.

Educational Uses of Wikis